Memorable Famous Quotes About Computers

Remember What Al Gore Said About the Internet?

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But what... is it good for?--An engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, commenting on the microchip in 1968.

We could tick off a myriad of answers to the question above about what microchips, and computers, are good for--we wouldn’t have a space program without them, they’ve made our world a chatty neighborhood, and provide instant communication, just to name a few--but why don’t we let people speak for themselves:

Everything that can be invented has been invented.--Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.--Ken Olson, president/founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.--Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year.--The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.

It's my belief that computers aren't something you use like you would a Stairmaster. You can't get a workout on it in a half-hour. You need to have it as part of your life.--Elisabeth Stock, Computers for Youth, as quoted by “The New York Times“.

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18 000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers of the future may have only 1 000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1½ tons.--Popular Mechanics, March 1949.

Internet publishing can be more powerful than print journalism, given its immediacy and lack of corporate or governmental filters.--Dave Winer

...the best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.--Bill Gates.

Information Superhighway is really an acronym for 'Interactive Network For Organizing, Retrieving, Manipulating, Accessing And Transferring Information On National Systems, Unleashing Practically Every Rebellious Human Intelligence, Gratifying Hackers, Wiseacres, And Yahoos'.--Keven Kwaku

The only people who have anything to fear from free software (such as GNAT) are those whose products are worth even less.--David Emery.

I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'--Mike Godwin

There's no set architecture in Linux. All roads lead to madness.--Microsoft executive Martin Taylor.

The big corporations are suddenly taking notice of the web, and their reactions have been slow. Even the computer industry failed to see the importance of the Internet, but that's not saying much. Let's face it, the computer industry failed to see that the century would end --Douglas Adams

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.-- Douglas Adams.

People who grow alarmed at what privacy they may be giving up each time they use the Internet have not fully grasped how much they routinely reveal each time they...draw a salary, dial the phone, subscribe to a magazine, join a club, enter a hospital, complete a coupon, enter a contest, hook up to cable TV, or use their credit cards to make the most innocent of purchases - even a throwaway novel at their local independent bookstore. --Richard Powers author

The smiley is an attack on writers and readers alike. If it is funny, it doesn't need a smiley. If is not funny, a smiley won't help it. The smiley teaches writers that anything they write will pass as humor as long as it is punctuated properly. It teaches readers that they must ignore their better judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent.--Jim Showalter.

Pigs flying over the frozen landscape of hell reported that online retailer Amazon turned in the first profit in its history on Tuesday, just moments after the sun set in the East." What's next? People paying to read an online newsletter?--Jen Muehlbauer SatireWire

Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare.--Blair Houghton.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.--Stephen Hawking

What were once minuscule workplace annoyances are now major priority issues. Like noisy fans and power supplies! ANYONE who complains about a noisy fan or power supply needs to spend a week or two in the presence of a PUNCH CARD machine. Three weeks later, when they recover their sanity, give them their old computer back. See if they complain. I THINK NOT !--Simon Travaglia, the B.O.F.H.

Once the Invisible Hand has taken all the historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brick maker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), and high-speed pizza delivery.--Neal Stephenson

Blink your eyelids periodically to lubricate your eyes.--Page 16 of the HP "Environmental, Health Safety Handbook for Employees".

At this time I do not have a personal relationship with a computer.--Janet Reno

Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more user-friendly... Their best approach, so far, has been to take all the old brochures, and stamp the words, 'user-friendly' on the cover.--Bill Gates.

It's ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute.--Marvin Minsky

When Roman engineers built a bridge, they had to stand under it while the first legion marched across. If programmers today worked under similar ground rules, they might well find themselves getting much more interested in Ada !--Robert Dewar, President Ada Core Technologies.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.--B. F. Skinner

In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.--E.W. Dijkstra.

There is no doubt that human survival will continue to depend more and more on human intellect and technology. It is idle to argue whether this is good or bad. The point of no return was passed long ago, before anyone knew it was happening.--Theodosius Dobzansky

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.--John F. Kennedy

The global village is not created by the motor car or even by the airplane. It’s created by instant electronic information movement.--Marshall Mcluhan

Linux: find out what you've been missing while you've been rebooting Windows NT.-- Infoworld.

Every paragraph an idea, every idea an image, every image an index, indices strung together along dimensions of my choosing, and I travel through them, sometimes with them, sometimes across them. I produce new sense, nonsense, and nuisance by combination and variation, and I follow the scent of a quality through sand dunes of information. Hints of an attribute attach themselves to my sensors and guide me past the irrelevant, into the company of the important; or I choose to browse the unfamiliar and tumble through volumes and volumes of knowledge still in the making.--Marcos Novak, 1992

We are a bit of stellar matter gone wrong. We are physical machinery - puppets that strut and talk and laugh and die as the hand of time pulls the strings beneath. But there is one elementary inescapable answer. We are that which asks the question.--Sir Arthur Eddington

Some people become so immersed in technology that they risk losing their own identity -- a syndrome called technosis. You are a victim of technosis if you answer 'yes' to questions such as: 'Do you feel out of touch when you haven't checked your answering machine or voice mail in the last 12 hours?' Symptoms of technosis include overdoing work and never feeling finished, believing faster is better, and not knowing how to function successfully without technology.--Michelle M. Weil and Larry D. Rosen, TechnoStress, 1999

But they are useless. They can only give you answers.--Pablo Picasso.

The whole question comes down to this: Can the human mind master what the human mind has made?--Paul Valery, Slaves of the Machine, 1997

Physics is the universe's operating system.--Steven R Garman

Your pathway through its passages is determined by your mouse click, making your experience of hypertext a malleable and personalized phenomenon.--Paul Gilster, Digital Literacy, 1997

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done.--Andy Rooney.

There are medieval manuscript books that may have lain unread for hundreds of years, but offered their treasures to the first reader who found and tried them. An electronic text subjected to the same neglect is unlikely to survive five years.-- James O'Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace, 1998

If patterns of ones and zeros were like patterns of human lives and death, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?--Thomas Pynchon

Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks.--Author Unknown

The net is nothing but an inert mass of metal, plastic and sand. We are the only living beings in cyberspace.-- Richard Barbrook

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.--Isaac Asimov

A new universal alphabet is in the making, to replace the 256 characters now known to computers with a set running to about 35,000, embracing every distinct symbol in every writing system known to humankind.-- James O'Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace, 1998

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.--Arthur C. Clarke.

In the end, the answer to 'Could computers think?' is that it doesn't matter whether they think. What matters is whether we think they think. In the decades ahead, as we learn ever more about how we ourselves work, and as our computers become ever more complex and competent, the words computer and think will continue to warp, until they're so different from their 1940s meanings that the question will lose relevance -- and, then, meaning. In time, the boundaries between the born and the made, the grown and the built, the living and the dead, the evolved and the programmed, the biological and the artificial, will evaporate. They're already melting like candles in a firestorm.-- Paul Valery, Slaves of the Machine, 1997

I don't think there's anything unique about human intelligence. All the neurons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion.--Bill Gates

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.--Nicholas Negroponte.

I have spent countless hours trying to get my computer to perform even the most basic data-processing functions, such as letting me play "F-117A Stealth Fighter" on it. I have personally, with my bare hands, changed my "WIN.INI" and "CONFIG.SYS" settings. This may not mean much to you, but trust me, it is a major data-processing accomplishment. Albert Einstein died without ever doing it. ("WAIT a minute!" were his last words. "It erased my equation! It was "E' equals something!")--Dave Barry.

Why shouldn't a PC work like a refrigerator or a toaster?--Walter Mossberg.

Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding.--Louis Gerstner, CEO, IBM

What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers?--Walter F. Mondale.

Not even computers will replace committees, because committees buy computers.--Edward Shepherd Mead

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers. --Sydney J. Harris.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.--Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language

The computer programmer ... is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver ... universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs. Moreover ... systems so formulated and elaborated act out their programmed scripts. They compliantly obey their laws and vividly exhibit their obedient behavior. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.--J. Weizenbaum (Computer Power and Human Reason, page 115

Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.--Clifford Stoll

When I speak about computer programming as an art, I am thinking primarily of it as an art form, in an aesthetic sense. The chief goal of my work as an educator and author is to help people learn how to write beautiful programs...My feeling is that when we prepare a program, the experience can be just like composing poetry or music...Some programs are elegant, some are exquisite, some are sparkling. My claim is that it is possible to write grand programs, noble programs, truly magnificent ones!...computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. Programmers who subconsciously view themselves as artists will enjoy what they do and will do it better.--D. Knuth (Computer Programming as an Art. Turing Award Speech 1974

If you were plowing a field, what would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?--Seymour Cray on massively parallel architectures.

Computers are to computing as instruments are to music. Software is the score whose interpretations amplifies our reach and lifts our spirits. Leonardo da Vinci called music the shaping of the invisible, and his phrase is even more apt as a description of software.-- A. Kay

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.--Stewart Brand

It's [programming] the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artist. There's an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like because you have to do very precise thinking. On the other hand, it has a wildly creative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation.--A. Hertzfeld (original Mac programmer

Looking at the proliferation of personal web pages on the net, it looks like very soon everyone on earth will have 15 Megabytes of fame.--M.G. Siriam

pixel, n.: A mischievous, magical spirit associated with screen displays. The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology: Witness the sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial intelligence, and the trolls in the marketing department.--Jeff Meyer

The value of a prototype is in the education it gives you, not in the code itself.--A. Cooper, The Inmates are Running the Asylum.

In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time - literally - substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it. --Peter F. Drucker

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be. ... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.--F. Brooks The Mythical Man Month, pages 7-8)

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.--Isaac Asimov.

The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology--the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects.-- Abelson and G. Sussman in "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

Wisdom is perishable. Unlike information or knowledge, it cannot be stored in a computer or recorded in a book. It expires with each passing generation.--Anonymous

Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, deserves to be.--David Thornburg.

A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.--Douglas Adams

I took the initiative in creating the Internet.--Al Gore.